I’m the founder of MyStarChain, which runs blockchain-based public voting for awards, pageants and competitions through the MyStarPick platform.

In August my team ran the public vote for the 70th Miss Korea pageant. When the count closed, nobody asked us to prove it. The organiser did not need to, the contestants did not need to, and the fans did not need to, because every single vote already sat on a public ledger where anyone could check it. That is a strange feeling in this industry, and it is the reason I am writing this.

Public vote for the 70th Miss Korea pageant, August 2026. 7,855 fans cast 47,859 votes, every one of them recorded on a public blockchain.

Across the competitions we have supported since our founding, about 180,000 fans have cast more than 2.8 million votes through our platform. We have not had a single tampering incident, and that is not because we are unusually careful. It is because the system is built so that the operator, including us, cannot touch the count.

Why trust collapsed

Anyone who works in Korean entertainment remembers November 2019, when the producers of Mnet’s Produce 101 series, the country’s most popular idol audition franchise, were arrested for rigging the results. The court later found that rankings had been predetermined across all four seasons, and the lead producer was sentenced to two years in prison. Fans had paid for every text-message vote. The groups formed by those votes were eventually disbanded.

Also Read: How we use AI to triage inbound B2B leads without blasting everyone the same way

Korea was not an exception. It was an early warning. Across the world, public votes for awards, talent shows, music charts and brand campaigns now face the same three threats: bot and macro voting that inflates a favourite overnight, organisers who can quietly adjust a count nobody can audit, and sponsors who no longer believe the numbers they paid for. Major broadcasters and award bodies have responded by tightening vote limits, adding fraud detection and rewriting their rules, which tells you how serious the problem has become. Yet every one of those fixes still asks the audience to trust the organiser. That is the part that is broken.

A popularity award that fans believe was bought or botted is worth less than no award at all.

What a verifiable vote actually looks like

The fix is not more moderators or a better spreadsheet. The fix is removing the operator from the trust equation. When every vote is recorded as a token transfer on a public blockchain rather than in a database someone controls, fans can verify their own votes. An organiser can hand a journalist a link instead of a statement. If a result is challenged, the evidence is already public.

This is what we did for Miss Korea, and it is what we did in Malaysia for the PC.com Readers’ Choice Awards 2026, the country’s largest IT awards, where consumers chose the technology brands of the year. We ran the vote for the BusinessToday Industry Choice Awards 2026 on the same infrastructure. This autumn we brought it to the audience vote of an international film festival, where the public, not the jury, decided which films to honour. We are also running the public vote for Supermodel International 2026 in Thailand, where fans can pay in their own currency.

Also Read: Inside Singapore’s AI push: Lighthouses, rice importers and robot labs

The part nobody expected: It is also better data

Here is what we learned only after running dozens of these votes. A verified vote is not just a fairer vote. It is the most honest signal a brand can get about who its future customers are.

A survey asks a panel what they might do. A fan vote records what an identified person actually did, at a moment they cared about, for a brand or a person they chose. That is why we are now running a proof of concept with a global brand in which the same verified participants who voted are issued a redemption code, and we track whether they walk into a store and use it. The organiser gets a trustworthy result. The brand gets a line from participation to purchase, on people who chose to be identified, rather than on an inferred lookalike audience.

When every authenticated vote becomes a node in a graph of real fan relationships, it becomes possible to see which audiences cluster together, who actually influences whom, and which cultural trends are forming before they show up in sales. None of it works unless the underlying vote is trustworthy, which is why we spent years on the boring part first.

What I would ask organisers to do

If you run an award, a festival, a talent competition or a brand campaign with a public vote, ask your vendor two questions. Can a fan independently verify that their vote was counted? And if a result is disputed, can you publish the evidence rather than a statement? If the answer to either is no, you are asking your audience to trust you, and 2019 taught this industry how that ends.

The fan vote does not need to be abandoned. It needs to be made verifiable, and then it becomes one of the most valuable assets an organiser has.

—

Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. You can also share your perspective by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of e27.

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Most small businesses in Southeast Asia already run on WhatsApp. Orders arrive there, suppliers send invoices there, staff send photos of receipts there. So when owners hear “AI”, the first idea is usually a chatbot that answers customers faster.

After building AI systems for food, professional services and property businesses in Indonesia and Singapore, I think that idea points at the wrong problem. Answering is rarely what eats a team’s day. What eats it is everything that has to happen after the answer: the order that has to be written down, the payment that has to be matched, the delivery that has to be booked, the receipt that has to end up in the books.

Here is what we have learned about making AI useful for an SME, rather than impressive in a demo.

Start with one workflow, not “AI for the business”

The projects that work start narrow: one recurring job that someone does every day by hand. At Rosalie Cheese, a food business selling through WhatsApp, that job was order admin — reading chats, confirming orders, arranging payment and delivery. It took the team more than four hours a day. Once an agent handled that flow, with the team reviewing instead of typing, it took about 20 minutes.

The narrow start matters because it gives you a number you can check. “We use AI now” is not a result. “Order admin went from four hours to 20 minutes” is.

The bottleneck is the handoff, not the answer

At a professional-services firm we work with, reconciliation took a team of four more than 20 hours a week. None of that time was spent on hard accounting judgement. It was spent moving information: from a bank statement to a spreadsheet, from a receipt to a ledger, from one person to the next.

When those handoffs run on their own and only the real exceptions reach a person, the same work takes under 30 minutes a week. The accountants did not get faster at accounting. They stopped being the copy-paste layer between systems.

Also Read: Gen Z is bringing its own AI to work. Singapore’s SMEs need rules, not bans

Numbers should come from code, not from a model

A language model is very good at reading a messy photo of a receipt or a voice note from a supplier. It should not be the thing that decides what a total is. In the systems we build, the AI reads and interprets, but figures and actions follow fixed, checkable logic. If the books say a number, there is a rule you can point to that produced it.

This is the difference between a tool a finance lead will trust and one they will quietly double-check forever — which means no time saved at all.

Anything involving money or a customer waits for a human

The fastest way to lose an owner’s trust is an AI that sends the wrong thing to a customer or pays the wrong invoice. So consequential actions wait for approval. In practice that approval is one tap in the same WhatsApp thread, and it keeps the owner in control while removing the typing around the decision.

Go live in weeks, inside the tools the team already uses

SMEs do not have time for a six-month transformation programme, and they do not want another dashboard to log in to. A first workflow should be live in about a week, running in WhatsApp, the spreadsheet and the accounting software the team already has. If the new system needs its own training course, it will not be used.

Also Read: Singapore SMEs buy back time with AI, but messy data keeps pilots stuck

What to ask before you buy

If you are an SME owner looking at AI, three questions cut through most of the noise:

• Which single, recurring job will this take off my team, and how many hours does that job take today?
• When the AI is unsure or wrong, what happens, and who approves anything involving money or customers?
• Does it work inside the tools we already use, or does it add a new one?

The answers will tell you more than any demo. The goal is not to have AI. The goal is to get your team’s evenings back.

—

Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. You can also share your perspective by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of e27.

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For years, Southeast Asia’s crypto regulators have asked exchanges the same set of questions. Where is your licence? Where is your local entity? Where are your cold wallets, and whose name is on them?

On October 29, North Korea answered with a question of its own: whose laptop is this?

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, says an attacker compromised a laptop belonging to a single DevOps engineer. From there, the intruder reached a “service container” and pushed through unauthorised withdrawals.

Also Read: Crypto’s new threat is not a hack, but a knock at the door

The estimated impact is about US$6.3 billion, roughly four times the US$1.5 billion Bybit heist of February 2025 that held the previous record. About US$3 billion has been frozen so far.

TRM Labs and Chainalysis both point to North Korea. Chainalysis names TraderTraitor, the state-backed cluster linked to Bybit.

Binance says it has found no evidence that wallet private keys leaked. That line is meant to reassure. It should do the opposite. The attacker never needed the keys. They did not crack the safe; they borrowed the hand that operates it.

Ring-fencing worked. It just wasn’t enough

Thailand offers the cleanest test case. Binance TH is run by Gulf Binance, a joint venture between an affiliate of Gulf Energy Development and the Binance group. It holds Thai SEC licences and says it keeps its cold wallets separate from the global exchange’s, inside its own legal entity.

That is precisely the architecture regulators across the region have demanded since the FTX collapse. On its own terms, it seems to have held: Gulf Binance says Thai customers’ assets are safe.

And yet, within hours, Binance TH suspended crypto deposits and withdrawals for a security check. Thai users whose assets were never touched still could not move them.

Ring-fencing protected the balance sheet. It did not protect access, confidence, or the shared engineers, code and processes that run through a global group whatever the cap table says. A licence tells you where the money sits. It says nothing about who can move it.

Also Read: Bybit invests US$8M in Hata to crack Malaysia’s regulated crypto market

Indonesia should be asking the same question. Binance has been Tokocrypto’s majority shareholder from the start, by co-founder Changpeng Zhao’s own account. How tightly local plumbing is tied to the parent’s is something only supervisors with real access can test, and this week they should.

The region is both the market and the hunting ground

Why should this land harder here than in London or New York? Chainalysis’s 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index ranks Vietnam fourth in the world, Indonesia seventh and the Philippines ninth. These are retail-heavy markets, where crypto doubles as a remittance rail, a gaming currency and a savings account.

Unlike bank deposits, funds held on an exchange carry no automatic insurance. Any refund is at the exchange’s discretion. Binance has promised to cover every loss from its SAFU fund and company money, and it can: it held about US$144 billion in assets before the attack, according to DefiLlama. A mid-sized exchange in Jakarta, Manila or Ho Chi Minh City hit by the same playbook could not.

And it is a playbook, not a freak event. Southeast Asia has already read its opening chapter. In 2022, the Ronin Network behind Axie Infinity, built by Vietnam-founded Sky Mavis and beloved by Filipino play-to-earn gamers, lost US$620 million. The way in was an employee who opened a fake job-offer PDF.

Since then, the trick has been polished. Researchers at Wiz, Unit 42 and Microsoft describe the same pattern: a “recruiter” on LinkedIn, an attractive role, a coding test hosted on GitHub, and malware riding in on a developer’s ambition. Bybit fell to a version of it. Now, it appears, so has Binance.

That makes the region a target twice over. It is home to millions of retail holders. It is also one of the world’s deepest pools of remote engineers, many working in crypto and fintech, and many open to exactly the kind of well-paid offshore role North Korea loves to advertise.

The rescue came from private kill switches

Look at who limited the damage. It was not a regulator or a court. Zhao thanked Tether for freezing about US$971 million and Circle for about US$823 million of stolen stablecoins.

Also Read: Southeast Asia can’t simply license its way to stablecoin sovereignty

In the biggest crypto heist on record, the most effective police force was two private companies that can switch tokens off. That is welcome this week. It is an uncomfortable fact every other week, because no regulator in Bangkok, Jakarta or Manila decides when those switches get flipped.

Communication was its own weak spot. AFP noted that Binance’s posts on X swung between insisting user funds were “completely safe” and promising to “cover all losses”. In markets where retail investors learn about losses from Telegram groups before official notices, mixed messages are a security risk in their own right.

License the people, not just the wallets

So what should change? First, regulators should stop treating custody location as the finish line. Licensing reviews need harder questions: who can trigger withdrawals, from which devices, with how many independent approvals, and how fast can a transfer be stopped?

Second, red-team tests should simulate a phished developer, not just a stolen key. Running untrusted third-party code on machines that touch production should be a reportable failure, not a bad habit.

Third, local subsidiaries should prove they can keep honouring withdrawals when the parent freezes. Ring-fencing that protects assets but not access is half a promise.

Fourth, incident disclosure should come within hours, in local languages, with one consistent message.

Founders building exchanges, wallets and fintech rails have homework too. Treat hiring channels as attack surface. Treat your DevOps team’s laptops as the vault door, because that is what they now are.

Also Read: AI agents broke into 100 firms for pocket change. SEA’s online shops fit the target profile

Binance will very likely survive this. Analysts at Fundstrat see no meaningful solvency risk. A smaller Southeast Asian platform would not be so lucky.

The lesson is not that crypto is doomed. It is that the region’s rulebook was written for the 2022 problem: an exchange quietly spending its customers’ money. The 2026 problem is a state-backed hacking unit that needs only one engineer to open one file.

The vault was in the right country. The key was in someone’s backpack.

The post North Korea’s hiring scam just cost Binance US$6.3B. SEA’s engineers are on the shortlist appeared first on e27.

Bitcoin fell 4.87 per cent to US$77,037.20 in 24 hours and underperformed a broadly weaker crypto sector. A confirmed security incident at Binance on October 29 triggered the drop. That shock arrived against a 65 per cent correlation with the S&P 500. Macro risk aversion had already set a defensive tone. The result was a fear-driven repricing that hit the largest digital asset harder than its peers and exposed how quickly confidence drains when the system’s central counterparty looks vulnerable.

The breach involved hot wallets. Arkham, Chainalysis, and TRM Labs estimate total outflows ranging from US$2 billion up to US$6 billion. The higher figure would make it the largest cryptocurrency heist in history. Traders sold before the exchange provided full details. That response was rational because the platform anchors a huge share of global crypto liquidity.

Changpeng Zhao and co-founder Yi He moved quickly to reassure users. Yi He pledged that the company would cover all hacking losses using its capital margins and its Secure Asset Fund for Users, known as SAFU. Current executives echoed the message that customer funds were safe. Those statements matter. They landed in a market already inclined to distrust reassuring words until on-chain evidence backs them up. Trust in an exchange rests on proof, not press releases, and volatility lives in the gap between the two.

Containment has moved fast. Major crypto entities froze roughly US$3 billion in stolen assets. Tether froze US$1.57 billion. Circle froze more than US$800 million. Ripple froze US$200 million. World Liberty Financial contributed additional assets. That coordination is a genuine bright spot and shows the industry’s emergency-response machinery can act when the stakes are high. Binance suspended all deposits and withdrawals while its team conducts security checks.

Binance paused trading on the Binance Alpha platform as a precaution. Binance US confirmed it remained entirely unaffected. That detail matters for users in the United States and does little to calm global trading in the immediate term. The exchange said withdrawal access will restore automatically once it fully deploys security patches. Until that happens, uncertainty itself becomes a force that moves prices. Frozen funds reduce the final damage, but they do not restore normal deposit and withdrawal flow.

Also Read: Bitcoin rebounds to US$81,000 but faces weakest October in 6 years

The secondary driver was mechanical and brutal. The initial slide triggered a cascade of leveraged long liquidations totalling more than US$629 million in one hour. More than 96 per cent of those positions were bullish long bets. That is the signature of an over-leveraged market catching a sudden shock. When long positions close under pressure, selling feeds on itself, pushing prices lower and triggering more liquidations in a feedback loop that has nothing to do with fundamentals and everything to do with positioning.

Binance’s native token BNB tumbled more than seven per cent, underperforming Bitcoin and underscoring how exchange-specific risk radiates outward. The broader crypto sector weakened. Bitcoin’s underperformance relative to that weaker sector points to a specific loss of confidence rather than a uniform risk-off move. The forced selling did not reflect a fresh judgement about long-term value. It reflected a sudden scramble for exits in a crowded trade.

The 65 per cent correlation with the S&P 500 ties this episode to the wider financial system. Crypto does not trade in isolation. A macro-driven selloff in risk assets creates a backdrop where investors already want to reduce exposure, and the Binance shock accelerated that process.

When equities weaken and volatility rises, Bitcoin increasingly trades like a high-beta risk asset rather than an uncorrelated hedge. Correlation doesn’t explain the trigger. It explains why the decline gained traction so quickly. A market already leaning defensive needs little push to turn speculation into a rout. The exchange scare supplied the push, and the macro backdrop supplied the slope.

Also Read: The Fed decides today: Here are the 2 levels every Bitcoin trader should watch

Technically, the picture is stretched but not without structure. Bitcoin’s 14-day relative strength index sits at 24.32, firmly in oversold territory and suggesting immediate selling pressure may be nearing exhaustion. Price is testing a critical support band between US$76,264 and US$76,476. If that zone holds and Binance provides a verified update that contains the incident, a relief bounce toward the 50-day exponential moving average near US$80,789 becomes plausible.

The near-term bias remains bearish until price reclaims the US$79,282 level, which represents the 50 per cent Fibonacci retracement. A decisive break below US$76,264 support would open the path to the next major demand zone near US$75,800. That level aligns with the short-term holder cost basis and would likely intensify pain for recent buyers.

My view is that this episode is less about the breach itself and more about the conditions that let one security failure trigger a US$629 million liquidation cascade in one hour. The market entered this shock with too much long-side leverage and too little margin for error. That is a structural vulnerability, not an isolated event. The industry’s ability to freeze roughly US$3 billion in stolen assets is impressive and genuinely reduces the final damage. It does not change the fact that hot-wallet concentration remains a systemic risk.

Binance’s pledge to cover losses through SAFU and capital margins is the right response. The size of that fund relative to the upper end of the outflow estimates means the public will want more than assurances. It will want a full accounting, independent verification, and a clear timeline for restoring withdrawal access. Until then, every speculative claim will carry outsized weight.

The practical takeaway for anyone watching this situation is to treat speculation and phishing messages as a source of risk rather than a signal. Scams offering refunds or wallet verification are already capitalising on the chaos. Anyone who acts on those messages risks compounding a trading loss with a personal security breach.

The only reliable sources are Binance’s official X account and announcements on its official website. Withdrawal capabilities will return once security patches are fully deployed. That moment will be a more meaningful test of confidence than any intraday bounce. For now, the near-term outlook remains under bearish pressure.

The key question is whether Bitcoin can defend the US$76,264 to US$76,476 support zone following Binance’s official update, or whether a break lower takes price toward US$75,800. The answer will depend less on charts and more on whether the exchange can replace fear with verified facts.

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Joel Neoh has spent two decades selling things to adults: group-buying deals at Groupon, cashback at Fave, DNA kits and supplements at Prenetics. His new job asks him to build a business on a platform where a large slice of the audience still needs a parent’s permission to buy anything.

Roblox has appointed the Malaysian serial founder as Managing Director for Southeast Asia and Oceania, making him its senior-most business lead across the two regions. Neoh, who joined in October, will run regional strategy, court brands and local businesses, and try to grow a creator ecosystem that does more than just play.

Also Read: Beyond play-to-earn: 14 Southeast Asian gaming and sports-tech startups still in the game

On paper, it is a growth hire. Read the fine print, and it looks just as much like a trust hire.

The safety question comes first

Neoh’s own framing is unusually restrained for a newly minted regional chief. In an interview with Marketing-Interactive, he said his first priority was simply to “listen, learn and build relationships” with creators, developers, educators, brands and, notably, policymakers.

That last group matters. Indonesia’s Government Regulation No. 17/2025, known as PP Tunas, has been in force since March 28, 2026, and Roblox is the one gaming platform named among the services it covers. In April, the communications ministry said Roblox’s feature changes fell short of the country’s child protection standards, before confirming compliance at the end of that month.

Officials have also kept up pressure for Roblox to open a local office in Indonesia. Across the Strait, Roblox pledged stronger safeguards in Malaysia following government scrutiny and a serious incident involving children in Johor, and while gaming platforms sit outside Malaysia’s current under-16 social media rules, the government has said they could be reviewed if safety complaints rise.

Neoh acknowledged that Roblox’s young community brings “both an incredible opportunity and a responsibility”. For a platform whose biggest regional markets are writing rules with it squarely in mind, that responsibility is not a talking point. It is the licence to operate. The wider debate on what comes after outright social media bans suggests regulators are only getting started.

From player base to creator hub

Neoh’s longer-term pitch is that SEA should be where Roblox experiences are made, not merely consumed. AI tools that cut the cost of building games, he argues, could let developers in Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia ship experiences to global audiences, a thesis that echoes the broader rise of AI-enabled gaming entrepreneurs.

The logic holds. In SEA, gaming is less a channel than the entire playing field, and Indonesia in particular has a deep bench of young, digitally native players. But turning players into paid creators is a much harder trick. Creator economies tend to reward a handful of hit studios disproportionately, and Neoh will need to show that local developers can earn real money, not just applause.

He insists success “isn’t just about growing the number of users”. Fair enough, though Roblox’s shareholders will still be counting them.

Brands, but carefully

The commercial piece is where Neoh’s Groupon and Fave DNA shows. He sees an opening for marketers who want to reach younger audiences beyond ads and social feeds, through immersive brand experiences, virtual goods and collaborations with local creators. The goal, he says, is to help brands move from advertising at communities to “creating experiences with communities”.

Early movers already exist. Indonesian children’s magazine Bobo brought its IP onto Roblox with Volare Advertising Network. Singapore’s Esplanade built “Beatsverse” around its Baybeats festival, featuring music from more than 20 local artists. Malaysian QSR chain Marrybrown is testing links between gameplay, its loyalty programme and physical outlets via its MB App.

That Marrybrown experiment is the most Fave-like idea on the list: online engagement converted into offline footfall. It is also the one that needs the most care. Neoh himself conceded that everything must be “thoughtful, age-appropriate”. Fast-food rewards pitched to a young audience are exactly what child-protection advocates watch for. The argument that the creator economy is distribution, not marketing will be stress-tested here.

The rivals are not sitting still

Roblox is hardly alone in chasing SEA’s young gamers and creators. Sea’s Garena, whose Free Fire remains a staple across the region, is weaving AI deeper into its gaming arm. Microsoft’s Minecraft and Epic Games’ Fortnite, with its creator toolset, compete globally for the same user-generated content talent, while Naver’s Zepeto has long courted Asian teens with avatar-led social spaces. For brands, the platform choice increasingly comes down to where young users already spend their social time.

Why Neoh, why now

Neoh’s CV reads like a map of SEA’s consumer internet over the past 15 years. He co-founded SAYS.com in 2010, later acquired by Catcha Group, then built GroupsMore, which merged into Groupon, where he led Asia Pacific operations across a dozen markets until 2015. He went on to found Fave, which reached more than 50 cities and over 10 million users before Pine Labs, which has since listed publicly, acquired it in 2021.

Also Read: Creators, not impressions, will decide the next growth wave in gaming

He has also backed more than 50 startups, co-founded early-stage fund First Move and mentored at Endeavor. Most recently, he spent two years as managing director and chief consumer officer at Prenetics, building consumer health brands IM8 and CircleDNA.

Zhen Fang, Roblox’s VP of international, said the company would keep investing in regional teams, creators and partners, citing Neoh’s entrepreneurial record and local connections. The hire follows last year’s appointment of former Tinder APAC communications chief Papri Dev as Roblox’s head of communications for Asia Pacific.

The pattern is hard to miss. Roblox is staffing up for a region where reputation and regulation will shape growth as much as product does. Neoh’s network across founders, investors and policymakers may prove more valuable than his dealmaking playbook.

The real test is whether a founder who made his name getting people to spend can build a business where, for once, restraint is the product.

The post Roblox hands Fave founder Joel Neoh the keys to SEA. His first job isn’t growth, it’s trust appeared first on e27.

Speaking in Doha on 28 October 2026 at the United Nations Trade and Development (UNCTAD) World Investment Forum 2026 panel, “Investing in AI for an Inclusive Digital Future”, Ant International CEO Peng Yang called for a new, inclusive “re-globalisation” project that harnesses AI and digital connectivity to give small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) greater access to global markets and opportunities.

“Globalisation 1.0 mostly benefited large enterprises, and a lot of SMEs very rarely got to participate in the global economy,” said Yang. “Achieving inclusion is critical to re-globalisation, and AI will accelerate it by democratising opportunities.”

The limitation of Globalisation 1.0 and how AI and other innovations offer a chance to improve

Yang said one of the greatest limitations of Globalisation 1.0 was its concentration of power among large enterprises. Small businesses, which make up over 90 per cent of businesses globally, have often been left behind due to the gap in technologies, talent and other resources. It is difficult for them to participate in the last round of globalisation, which involves handling multiple markets and the complexities of global trade.

According to the WTO’s 2024 World Trade Report, eight per cent of small firms and 15 per cent of medium-sized firms export directly, compared with 30 per cent of large firms.

The AI divide compounds the challenge: a 2025 survey by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows 52 per cent of large firms used AI, compared with just 17.4 per cent of small firms.

However, the rise of AI means we have the chance to level the field and close the gap if we democratise AI technology and its applications to give equal opportunities to SMEs.

Also Read: Why Indonesian fintech’s ASEAN expansion cost more than anyone priced in

When innovation meets inclusion, SMEs can also grow and thrive on the global stage

Yang said that in the past three years, Ant International has been serving over 1 million new small merchants from 54 new markets globally, empowering them to participate in global trade.

“In the last three years, we have seen tremendous growth for SMEs when innovation meets inclusion. When we offer them powerful full-stack AI-native solutions, cross-border transaction volume of SMEs across our own businesses has been growing by about 50 per cent every year, which is 10 times the growth rate of the total volume of global trade,” he said.

“This shows that if we can do things right, drive innovation, provide the AI technologies, and make it more accessible for the small guys, they can take the global stage to grow and thrive,” Yang added.

Ant International processes 25 million transactions daily across its global payment, global account, embedded finance and digitalisation services. 95 per cent of its 150 million-strong global merchant customer base are SMEs. In September 2026, Ant International announced sweeping full-stack AI-native solutions on payment, account, FX, treasury and growth for global businesses, many designed to tackle SMEs’ challenges.

New full-stack AI-native solutions empowering SMEs to drive truly inclusive re-globalisation

• Democratising the Falcon TST FX model for SMEs

Cross-border FX and money management is expensive for SMEs. Ant International has been developing its Falcon TST AI forecast model, which achieved SOTA (state-of-the-art performance) on the MASE metric on a top global benchmark, with a consistent forecast accuracy rate of over 93 per cent, and has been working with the world’s leading banks to keep increasing coverage. Today, it has been democratised as part of the full-stack AI-native solutions for SMEs to use so they can handle global transactions more efficiently with less FX risk.

• Proprietary agents WorldFirst Autopilot and Antom Autopilot automate operations for SMEs

Under WorldFirst and Antom – Ant International’s core Global Account and Global Payment services – enterprise-grade financial capabilities are engineered into SME-friendly applications.

WorldFirst combines cross-border collections, payments, foreign exchange and fund management in one global account. This enables smaller businesses to manage international operations, collect money and make payments with less FX risk and access working capital at lower cost, even without finance and treasury teams. Ant International’s global AI business agent for SMEs — WorldFirst Autopilot — further simplifies the operations by streamlining financial tasks and connecting businesses to partner services through natural language interactions.

WorldFirst helps over 2 million SMEs to manage their cross-border accounts, with more than US$500 billion in cumulative transaction volume across 210+ markets. Its network connects SMEs to 130+ e-commerce platforms and 600+ ecosystem partners, helping them navigate overseas markets and grow globally.

Antom Autopilot simplifies payment operations for merchants, especially SMEs, with AI support across onboarding, integration, analysis, risk management and reconciliation. By the end of 2026, 95 per cent of merchants are expected to complete onboarding with Antom within 1 hour. Its SmartDispute provides dispute analysis and appeal strategies, helping merchants achieve a 41.8 per cent win rate versus 24.5 per cent without the tool, while its fully automated AutoDispute helps merchants recover an average of 18 per cent of chargeback losses, reducing the additional resources SMEs need to devote to dispute management.

Also Read: Fintech, DeFi and applied AI define Southeast Asia’s new venture discipline

• Alipay+ empowers SMEs to access global consumers with AI-powered marketing solutions

For Global Payment, Alipay+, Ant International’s global wallet gateway, connects over 50 digital wallets to more than 150 million merchants globally, over 95 per cent of them SMEs. Beyond seamless cross-border payments, small merchants are targeting global consumers online and in-store with more effective and precise campaigns through Alipay+’s AI-powered marketing solutions.

In the Siam Square commercial area in Bangkok, Thailand, the Alipay+ marketing campaign combining pre-trip social-media push and on-site ad displays helped small merchants grow TPV by 66 per cent YoY, with an increase in the number of orders by 115 per cent YoY; for merchants in Gaya Street in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, it drove more than 120 per cent growth in TPV and 140 per cent in orders; for a local skincare brand in Bali, Indonesia, it delivered a growth of 137 per cent in TPV and 140 per cent in orders during the campaign.

New foundations of trust for inclusive AI in public-private sector collaboration

Yang also stressed that businesses, including SMEs, need confidence that AI can be used safely and responsibly, particularly as AI agents take on financial and operational tasks. Effective safeguards require collaboration across the technology and financial industries, alongside regulators and international institutions.

“Trust is everything in payments and financial services, and it becomes even more critical in the AI era. We need to work closely with international organisations and regulators to develop appropriate frameworks, while building safeguards that allow businesses to use AI agents safely. Collaboration across the private sector must also be complemented by international institutions and regulators to establish common standards and trusted infrastructure,” said Yang.

Ant International is advancing this approach through collaboration across the public and private sectors. In Singapore, it works with the Infocomm Media Development Authority on privacy-enhancing technologies and participates in the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s BuildFin.ai initiative on developing and scaling responsible AI solutions for financial services.

The company is also collaborating with Visa and Mastercard on interoperability for Know Your Agent (KYA), helping strengthen trust in AI agents acting on behalf of consumers and businesses.

It also takes a step forward by introducing the industry-first Antom AgentSafePay, built to protect merchants navigating agentic commerce, to verify multi-dimensional purchase intent in real time, and to offer a fund guarantee against losses from intent misinterpretation, malicious prompt injection or other risks within merchant-deployed agents.

Yang said that, with the cost of AI lowered and accessibility made easier for SMEs, both small merchants and individuals can be equipped with enterprise-grade innovative solutions, fully automate their operations and benefit from the next global economic revolution.

“We believe in a future where the new normal of Globalisation will leave no one behind. When innovation meets inclusion, everyone can pursue their opportunities like the big guys did in the past,” Yang said.

The ninth WIF, the UN’s flagship forum for the global investment community, brings together policymakers, investors and business leaders to explore how investment can support sustainable, resilient and inclusive growth amid geopolitical fragmentation and rapid technological change.

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Ask a deeptech founder in Southeast Asia what keeps them up at night and few will blame the science. The harder problem is finding someone willing to let an unproven technology loose on a real building, a real plantation or a real data centre and then pay for it.

That is the gap Singapore Management University (SMU) is now selling its flagship competition on. The 13th Lee Kuan Yew Global Business Plan Competition (LKYGBPC), run by SMU’s Institute of Innovation & Entrepreneurship (IIE), opened applications on Wednesday for university founders and recent graduates working on urban and sustainability problems.

Also Read: Thirty climate tech startups in Southeast Asia that would rather build than pledge

Fifty finalists will be flown to Singapore from 28 September to 1 October 2027 to compete for more than SGD2.5 million (US$2 million) in prizes. That pot is roughly where it stood for the 12th edition’s US$2M grand finals. What has changed is the story around it.

From trophy to pipeline

The organisers now frame the contest less as a podium and more as a front door. Selected finalists can move into SMU’s Urban SustaInnovator (USI) accelerator, launched in 2025, which promises market access, pilot projects and introductions across Asia. Behind that sits the US$10 million USI Fund SMU IIE launched in May to back ventures as they pilot and scale.

“Founders of breakthrough technologies can create value only when they reach the people, industries and communities they are designed to serve,” said Rony Palathinkal, who heads both LKYGBPC and USI at SMU IIE.

The competition covers 12 focus areas, from climate-tech, energy and urban mobility to food and land use, longevity and healthtech, and sustainable materials and circularity. It is open to startups with at least one founder still enrolled at university or within five years of graduating.

US$10 million is a modest cheque by venture standards, likely enough for a handful of seed-stage bets. But the fund signals an important admission: a pitch trophy, on its own, rarely moves a deeptech company forward.

What the alumni actually got

SMU’s evidence comes from three 12th-edition finalists, and it is worth reading closely.

Malaysian agritech Qarbotech turns agricultural waste into compounds that lift crop productivity — the kind of farm-waste play some think could mint the region’s next climate unicorn. It is no stranger to pitch stages, having also taken top honours at Tokyo’s SusHi Tech 2026 contest.

Co-founder Chor Chee Hoe credits the LKYGBPC and USI network with meetings with family offices that led to several pilots. “Right now, we are halfway through a 12-month pilot with a large sugar cane plantation in the Philippines and we’re launching in another Southeast Asian market,” he said. An SMU connection also found Qarbotech a distributor for Thailand and Pakistan.

Also Read: Your deeptech company does not have one capital problem

Singapore’s Standard Physics, formerly Inviscid AI, combines real-time IoT sensor data with computational fluid dynamics (the physics of how air and heat move) to build digital twins that help buildings and data centres cut energy use. Founded by Qiu Ziming and Kabir Jain, it has secured a pilot with The GEAR, the Singapore innovation hub of Japanese construction giant Kajima, and is discussing three more. It recently raised a US$2.3 million seed round led by Square Peg Capital.

“YC was good at getting us from zero to one, and then USI has been very helpful in getting us from one to 10,” Jain said, referring to the startup’s stint in Y Combinator’s Winter 2026 cohort.

The third, Cambridge-based Mimicrete, founded in 2021 by Dr Liz Zijing Li, is developing “self-healing” concrete that seals its own cracks, extending infrastructure lifespan and cutting maintenance and carbon. It is validating the material at The GEAR, joining a growing list of startups such as Neocrete betting on low-carbon concrete.

These are encouraging stories, but they are pilot stories. A 12-month trial is a hypothesis, not recurring revenue, and Southeast Asian corporates are far better at starting trials than signing purchase orders, a problem e27 has tracked in the “frozen middle” where 57 per cent of firms cannot scale their AI pilots. Attribution is murky too: Standard Physics had Y Combinator in its corner before USI.

Singapore’s sandbox sales pitch

The timing leans on Singapore’s ambition to be the region’s test bed for sustainability tech. Its SGD37 billion (US$29 billion) Research, Innovation and Enterprise (RIE) 2030 plan earmarks SGD10.8 billion (US$8.4 billion) for mission-oriented research, including urban solutions and sustainability. In February, two ministries added a SGD40 million (US$31 million) USS Translation Fund to help companies pilot and commercialise such solutions.

SMU’s pitch to founders is that it can carry them beyond the island. It runs overseas centres in Bangkok, Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City and Shenzhen, and International Advisory Councils in eight countries. That network “enables us to forge connections that enable startups to cross borders,” said Professor Sun Sun Lim, SMU’s Vice President of Partnerships and Engagement.

The border-crossing is the real test. A sensor-laden pilot in a showcase Singapore building is a long way from a cash-strapped developer in Manila or a palm oil estate in Sumatra, where price tolerance is lower and procurement slower.

A crowded field for founders’ attention

LKYGBPC is not short of rivals. Accelerators such as Startupbootcamp now run dedicated sustainability cohorts in Singapore, Tokyo’s SusHi Tech hosts its own global pitch contest, and corporate innovation arms court foreign deeptech, as Deloitte’s recent demo day for Tokyo startups eyeing Southeast Asia showed. Closer to home, NUS and NTU run their own deeptech commercialisation programmes.

LKYGBPC’s edge is reach. Its 12th edition drew more than 1,500 deeptech entries from founders at 1,200 universities across 91 countries, including Stanford, Cambridge and the University of Tokyo, before ChemT and Polar Code took the top prizes. SMU says finalists from the 9th to 12th editions have collectively raised more than SGD1 billion (US$780 million).

Also Read: Startupbootcamp’s first Singapore sustainability cohort moves beyond generic climate tech

That figure deserves an asterisk. It is self-reported, cumulative across four editions and likely includes capital many of these teams would have raised anyway. Competitions are good at selecting winners; proving they made them is harder.

Shirley Wong, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at SMU IIE, Managing Partner of TNF Ventures and chair of the 13th edition’s advisory committee, frames urbanising Asia as both problem and opportunity. Applications close on 31 March 2027.

The more telling scorecard, though, will arrive before next year’s winners are crowned: how many of the last cohort’s pilots have turned into paying contracts.

The post LKYGBPC returns with a pitch to fix deeptech’s real bottleneck: customers appeared first on e27.

GoTo has now reported a net profit for three quarters in a row. Read past the headline, though, and the numbers show a company run by its payments arm, while its ride-hailing business absorbs the cost of a government-imposed fare squeeze.

GoTo reported a third-quarter net profit of Rp441 billion (about US$24.6 million), compared with a net loss of Rp255 billion (US$14.2 million) a year earlier.

Net revenue rose 17 per cent to Rp5.6 trillion (US$313 million). Group adjusted EBITDA jumped 84 per cent to Rp950 billion (US$53 million), and GoTo raised its full-year adjusted EBITDA guidance to Rp3.5-3.7 trillion (US$196-207 million), up from Rp3.2-3.4 trillion.

Also Read: GoTo’s first profit signals a fintech-driven future

CEO Hans Patuwo did not downplay the context. It was the first full quarter since the 8 per cent commission cap on GoRide took effect, and he said, “the impact has been significant.”

The 89 per cent growth is almost all GoPay

GoTo’s most striking number, an 89 per cent jump in core gross transaction value (GTV) to Rp194 trillion (US$10.8 billion), is mostly a payments figure. GoPay accounted for Rp187 trillion of that total, up 96 per cent.

The on-demand business that made Gojek a household name grew GTV by just 1 per cent, to Rp16.9 trillion (US$944 million).

Profitability follows the same pattern. Fintech adjusted EBITDA rose 304 per cent to Rp550 billion (US$30.7 million) on net revenue that grew 49 per cent to Rp2.3 trillion. On-demand services (ODS) managed Rp347 billion (US$19.4 million), up 3 per cent. Fintech now produces nearly three-fifths of the group’s adjusted EBITDA.

That continues the trend from the first quarter, when the fintech unit was already doing the heavy lifting. Six months later, the gap between the two halves of the company has widened.

The commission cap bites where it was meant to

The cost of Indonesia’s new rules shows up in mobility. Mobility net revenue fell 5 per cent to Rp757 billion. Segment adjusted EBITDA dropped 16 per cent to Rp159 billion (US$8.9 million), and margin slipped 50 basis points to 2.5 per cent.

GoTo puts the cap’s direct cost at roughly Rp150 billion (US$8.4 million) for the quarter, in line with its Rp300 billion full-year estimate. GoRide went EBITDA-negative in July. The company says it is now trending towards break-even, but it has not said when it will get there.

Gojek’s response has been to chase volume rather than value. Completed mobility orders rose 10 per cent, driven by mass-market products with lower ticket prices, while mobility GTV did not grow at all. In plain terms, drivers are completing more trips that are each worth less.

The politics behind those numbers are now formal. A Presidential Regulation released this month locks in the 8 per cent cap on two-wheel transport and classifies driver-partners as micro-entrepreneurs, not employees. That gives drivers a bigger share of each fare but stops short of the labour protections that employment would bring.

GoTo points to its Partner Appreciation Program, which ranges from BPJS health and employment cover to scholarships and fully funded Umrah pilgrimages. These are welcome benefits, but they are discretionary and can be withdrawn, unlike rights under labour law.

Also Read: Grab’s US$1.49B Atome deal signals a deeper race for SEA’s credit economy

Delivery is the next uncertainty. GoTo is still waiting for implementing regulations from the Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs, and it has widened its ODS guidance to Rp1.4-1.6 trillion to allow for them. Delivery performed better this quarter: adjusted EBITDA rose 20 per cent to Rp227 billion and margin improved to 2.1 per cent. Investors will be watching whether regulators extend similar pressure to food delivery.

A bigger loan book and a quiet admission

GoPay’s strength depends increasingly on lending. Loans outstanding rose 51 per cent to Rp12 trillion (US$670 million). Monthly transacting users grew 26 per cent to 30.4 million, while transactions grew 86 per cent to 2.8 billion.

The firm’s press release also contains a carefully worded admission. GoTo says it “pre-emptively tightened credit” for its highest-risk cohorts in the second quarter, which “limited the deterioration in credit quality” in the third. That means credit quality did get worse. As in previous quarters, GoTo has not disclosed non-performing loan ratios or delinquency figures. It argues that short loan tenors let it adjust underwriting quickly, but the market still has no data with which to check that claim.

The bottom line also needs some unpacking. Operating income was Rp351 billion, below reported net profit, so items below the operating line helped. Profit attributable to owners of the parent was higher still, at Rp557 billion (US$31.1 million). These figures are cleaner than the adjusted measures that drew scrutiny a year ago, but net profit is not yet driven mainly by operations.

Buying back stock at half the old floor

The capital-return story may tell investors the most. After the Indonesia Stock Exchange removed the Rp50 floor price on 28 September, GoTo spent Rp985 billion (US$55 million) buying back 36 billion shares, almost 3 per cent of its stock, by 29 October. That works out to an average of about Rp27 per share, roughly half the old floor and a fraction of the Rp338 IPO price.

GoTo will also cancel 32 billion treasury shares, about 2.7 per cent of shares outstanding, as approved at its 14 October extraordinary general meeting. It still has Rp2.5 trillion (US$140 million) available under a buyback authorisation that runs until June 2027.

Adjusted free cash flow of Rp1.2 trillion (US$67.5 million) means GoTo can afford the programme. Still, the fact that its stock is trading well below the old floor shows how little confidence the market currently has in the business, despite three profitable quarters.

The neighbours, and the merger nobody has ruled out

The competitive picture is not getting easier. Grab is moving deeper into credit through its Atome deal and its takeover of Superbank in Indonesia, putting it in direct competition with GoPay’s most profitable activity. ShopeePay remains a formidable rival in payments. On the streets of Jakarta, VinFast’s Green SM is challenging the gojek economy with e-scooters, at a time when the commission cap has made two-wheel rides less profitable for every platform.

Also Read: Taiwan kills Grab’s US$600M foodpanda deal, and Uber’s shadow is the reason

Grab faces its own questions. Its recent profit headline concealed cash burn in key areas, and the long-running prospect of a Grab-GoTo merger still hangs over both companies. A regulator that sets ride-hailing commissions is also likely to shape any deal between Indonesia’s two largest platforms.

Meanwhile, GoTo is investing in technology. Its 27-billion-parameter model that speaks Batak is a sign of ambition, though AI has yet to appear clearly in the margins.

What three quarters prove, and what they don’t

Three consecutive profitable quarters show that GoTo is no longer the cash-burning conglomerate investors once worried about. They do not yet show that Gojek can be a strong business under Indonesia’s new rules.

At the moment, GoTo is effectively a lending and payments company with a ride-hailing app on top. That can be a sound business model, but it carries more credit risk than the brand suggests. The next test is how GoTo handles a regulator that has already capped one of its revenue lines and may soon reach another.

The post Indonesia’s 8 per cent cap cost Gojek US$8.4M in a quarter. GoPay covered the bill appeared first on e27.

As Battery energy storage (BES) investment scales toward US$5 trillion, Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTP) is positioning Hong Kong as Asia’s launchpad for materials, integration, green finance and recycling — a bridge Southeast Asian founders can use to finance, certify and scale.

A battery used to be something most people thought about only when a phone ran flat or a car wouldn’t start. That is no longer the case. BES is becoming part of the infrastructure that makes power grids more resilient, keeps renewable electricity available regardless of the weather, keeps electric vehicles moving and keeps increasingly power-hungry data centres running. Market projections cited by HKSTP indicate that investment in the battery and energy storage sector will reach US$5 trillion over the next decade.

Also Read: ASEAN battery push enters a harder phase: building factories, standards and markets

Look closely at this trillion-dollar industry and it is clear the global battery race has moved far beyond simply manufacturing cells. A complete BES ecosystem runs across four interconnected stages. It begins upstream with advanced materials research. It moves midstream into system integration and smart power electronics that bring the technology into community applications. It relies on international green finance to de-risk and fund project rollouts. And it ends downstream with the safe discharge, second-life reuse and recycling of spent batteries, which closes the sustainability loop.

In its latest BES Strategic Analysis Report, HKSTP describes Hong Kong as Asia’s leading hub with a complete, four-stage value chainand why that matters for the region.

Beyond the battery cell

At the upstream end of the chain, chemistry comes first. Research is advancing in solid-state batteries, water-based flow batteries and carbon-nanotube current collectors. Sodium-ion and other next-generation technologies are also being explored to improve cost, energy density, safety and durability.

Hong Kong’s universities give the city a solid foundation in this field. Luquos Energy is one example already in commercial use. The HKSTP company is developing a water-based sulphur flow battery, and its system has been deployed with EV-charging infrastructure on the Chinese mainland, where it has cut users’ electricity costs by close to 70 percent.

A storage system has to work with charging equipment, buildings or the electricity grid. Software has to decide when batteries should charge or discharge. Battery-management systems monitor safety and performance, while distributed-energy platforms coordinate different sources of electricity and storage.

This brings us to the second stage: integration and intelligence. Applications already range from mobile battery generators on construction sites to fast EV charging. In other words, some of the most valuable work may happen around the battery rather than inside it.

Where finance enters the chain

 Large-scale energy-storage installations require substantial upfront capital. Returns can stretch over many years, and revenues may depend on electricity tariffs, grid services and how often a battery is used. That makes finance part of the proposition. 

Also Read: Thirty climate tech startups in Southeast Asia that would rather build than pledge

The Hong Kong Taxonomy for Sustainable Finance covers activities including battery manufacturing and recycling, while energy storage supports greater use of renewable electricity. The framework can give banks and investors a clearer basis for assessing whether BES projects qualify for green and sustainable financing.

Building on this momentum, HKSTP recently signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with a “Green Accelerator” to inject capital into high-potential solutions and help startups cross the commercialisation “valley of death”.

This combination of green finance, research and international compliance has already drawn global attention. Three of the world’s leading battery and energy storage companies, BYD, CATL and Gotion, have established a presence in the HKSTP ecosystem. Their arrival signals that Hong Kong’s role is not to compete in mass manufacturing, but to serve as a global launchpad and a bridge across every stage of the BES value chain. For Southeast Asian founders, the relevant question is whether that bridge can be used for financing, compliance and market entry — not just for visibility.

What happens when batteries retire

Every battery eventually reaches the end of its first life. For Hong Kong, that is becoming less theoretical. The Environmental Protection Department estimates that retired EV batteries will rise from around 1,300 tonnes in 2026 to approximately 6,700 tonnes by 2030.

Hong Kong’s first large-scale EV-battery recycling facility, at EcoPark, is intended to turn retired batteries into recycled black mass. The government has also been working on a producer-responsibility scheme.

Some batteries still have useful capacity after they are no longer suitable for vehicles. They can be repurposed for stationary storage, giving them a second life before their materials are recovered. The BES report also identifies second-life applications and technology for safely discharging retired batteries as opportunities at the final stage of the chain.

Recycling can then feed materials back to the start of the cycle. That reduces reliance on virgin resources and creates incentives to design batteries with recovery in mind. A value chain that looks linear can become increasingly circular.

An Vibrant ecosystem around the technology

Battery storage is only one part of HKSTP’s green-tech ecosystem activity. More than 250 green-tech companies are now in its ecosystem. GreenTech Hub, launched in 2025, facilitated more than 360 business-matching sessions, and organised more than 100 green-tech events in its first year, while its public-private partner network grew to 20 organisations.

Several companies in the HKSTP ecosystem have also produced technologies that HKSTP describes as world-first or Hong Kong-first applications.

One Energy has developed a battery-swapping system that incorporates what HKSTP describes as the world’s first water-cooled fast-charging system, and has taken its electric-mobility business into Southeast Asia, Europe and Africa. Halo Energy, meanwhile, has partnered with XPeng to launch Hong Kong’s first megawatt-level ultra-fast charging station.

The technologies differ, but their commercial needs often overlap. The journey starts with talent driving breakthroughs at the research stage. It moves on to validating solutions in real-world settings, then to using financial capital and listing mechanisms to scale, and finally to connecting with international investors to go global. That path to commercialisation is notoriously difficult, and Hong Kong is positioning itself to support green-tech ventures at every turning point.

Also Read: GenZero backs PCG Global’s push to export China-tested renewable energy model

For Southeast Asian founders and investors, Hong Kong’s advantage is clear: green finance and bankability support, midstream integration and software expertise, and emerging second-life and recycling capacity. Hong Kong is not competing on mass manufacturing — it is building the research, finance, compliance and connectivity layer that regional BES projects need.

With HKSTP’s ecosystem, GreenTech Hub and international partner network, that support is already accessible. For Southeast Asian founders, the opportunity is straightforward: use Hong Kong as the launchpad to finance, certify and scale the next battery storage project in their own market.

The post Powering the green transition: Why the global battery race runs through Hong Kong appeared first on e27.

Indonesia’s sharia P2P lending sector looks different in 2026 than it did when Dana Syariah Indonesia and a cohort of sharia-compliant fintechs scaled between 2018 and 2022. The sector that aimed to bring Islamic finance principles into digital lending has consolidated significantly. Several platforms have been through restructuring. Dana Syariah Indonesia, whose OJK license was revoked in 2024, is among the more publicly documented examples of a sharia P2P platform whose operations did not survive the sector’s accountability phase.

After four years inside sharia risk policy at Indonesian banks and a further fifteen across the country’s financial functions, I have watched this sub-sector with more interest than most. The structural questions underneath the sharia P2P journey are not addressed by conventional fintech analysis — and the lessons matter for whoever builds the next chapter of Indonesia’s Islamic fintech infrastructure.

What sharia P2P aimed to do

The Indonesian sharia P2P sector that emerged after OJK and DSN-MUI established frameworks for digital Islamic financing had a clear thesis. Indonesia’s Muslim-majority population represented a credit access market that conventional banking and conventional P2P were not adequately serving with sharia-compliant products. The platforms that built early aimed to combine the operational efficiency of digital lending with the religious compliance of classical Islamic finance.

The implicit assumption was that the sharia overlay would be additive — fatwa review, DPS oversight, sharia-compliant contract structures — and that the underlying business model would work as conventional P2P did. The audience would respond to sharia compliance with stronger engagement and stickier behaviour.

Also Read: Youth brain drain: A hidden threat in Indonesia’s agriculture sector

What turned out to be harder

Three structural factors made sharia P2P harder than the original models priced in.

The sharia trust premium cuts both ways. Sharia products carry an implicit trust premium — borrowers and lenders engage on the assumption that the religious compliance of the product means the platform itself is operating to a higher governance standard. When the platform delivers on that assumption, the trust premium produces stickier engagement. When the platform fails to deliver, the trust premium reverses sharply. The sense of broken religious commitment compounds the sense of broken commercial commitment. Recovery is harder than for conventional platform failures.

DSN-MUI oversight capacity. The number of qualified sharia scholars available to review fintech products is finite. The volume of sharia-compliant fintech products being developed has grown faster than the scholarly review capacity. The result is review lag, occasional approvals that the underlying scholars might revisit with more time, and Sharia Supervisory Board arrangements at the institution level that sometimes operate more nominally than the regulatory framework imagines.

Property-backed sharia financing complexity. Several Indonesian sharia P2P platforms, including Dana Syariah Indonesia, concentrated on property-backed financing structures (murabahah, ijarah, musharakah mutanaqisah variants). Property-backed financing introduces collateral valuation risk, illiquidity, and concentration risk that sharia compliance does not mitigate. The product structures are religiously valid. The underlying credit risk profile is not transformed by the compliance overlay.

Lessons learned

Six principles emerge from the Indonesian sharia P2P cycle.

Religious compliance is not credit risk management. Sharia-compliant structures address the religious permissibility of the transaction. They do not address default risk, collateral risk, fraud risk, or operational risk. Platforms that treated sharia compliance as a substitute for conventional credit risk discipline mispriced their exposure systematically.

The sharia trust premium is a balance sheet item. The trust that comes with sharia branding is real capital — measurable in retention, repayment behaviour, and acquisition cost. It is also fragile in ways the platform’s operations need to actively protect. Platforms that treated sharia trust as a marketing message rather than as an operational discipline eroded it faster than they built it.

DPS authority must be real, not nominal. The Sharia Supervisory Boards at the institution level were designed to provide ongoing review of operational practice, not just product approval at launch. Platforms whose DPS reviewed only at the points the regulator required, rather than at the points the business actually needed scrutiny, accumulated compliance risk over time.

Also Read: The working capital trap: Lessons from Indonesia’s first D2C generation

Property collateral is not solvency infrastructure. Property-backed sharia financing carries the same valuation, illiquidity, and concentration risks as conventional property lending — sometimes more, because sharia structures often require longer holding periods before collateral can be enforced. Platforms that priced property as a low-risk asset class because the product was sharia-compliant mispriced one of their largest exposures.

Religious community contagion is faster than market contagion. When a sharia platform fails, the reputational damage spreads through religious community networks that operate independently of mainstream business media. The platform’s failure becomes a topic in religious discussion forums, mosque communities, and Islamic finance education networks. The recovery process must address that community dimension, not just the market dimension.

The next chapter requires institutional infrastructure. Sharia P2P will return — the underlying demand for sharia-compliant credit access is durable. The next generation will need stronger institutional underpinnings: more robust DSN-MUI oversight, more independent DPS arrangements, more sophisticated underwriting that integrates sharia compliance with conventional credit discipline.

The macro stakes

Indonesia is the largest Islamic finance market in the world by population. The sharia fintech opportunity is real and not going away. The first generation of sharia P2P platforms — Dana Syariah Indonesia among them — built something Indonesia’s Muslim-majority population had not had before: digital access to sharia-compliant credit products at scale.

Some of that infrastructure survives. Much of it does not. The lessons from the first generation are now the foundation for whatever the next chapter looks like. For founders, investors, and regulators thinking about sharia fintech in 2026 and beyond, the question is no longer whether the opportunity exists. It is whether the institutional infrastructure — scholarly review capacity, DPS authority, integrated risk management, community trust stewardship — has caught up with the scale the first generation tried to operate at.

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The post The sharia trust premium: Lessons from Indonesia’s first sharia P2P generation appeared first on e27.